At noon today, January 20, Dr. Rochelle Walensky will take over as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and one of her top priorities will be to try to undo all the damage done to the agency by the Trump administration.
“How can I be sure that the people who are there – these incredible scientists, these incredible civil servants throughout their careers – understand and feel the value we should give them? They have been diminished. I think they were gagged, that science was not heard, ”Walensky said in a brief but comprehensive interview with JAMA on Tuesday. “This top-notch agency – world-renowned – has not really been appreciated in the last four years and very markedly in the last year. So, I have to fix this. “
Part of your plan to do this is to make these scientists uncomplicated and publicize their science, where it can make a difference. And that mixes with the next challenge: “Obviously, we need to get this country out of COVID and the current pandemic crisis,” she said. And this will also imply increasing communication with the public, as well as with state and local health officials and with members of Congress.
Walensky – professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and head of the infectious disease division at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital – will be new to the government’s health work when he takes over the federal agency of more than 10,000 employees today. “I will have all the benefits of coming in from the outside and being able to look inside and say, ‘It looks really broken,'” she said. For any institutional knowledge she needs, she will have a long-standing career team, she added.
Like President-elect Biden, Walensky will immediately focus on helping to smooth and accelerate the launch of the COVID-19 vaccine – and achieve the government’s goal of getting 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days. According to data from the January 19 CDC, the government distributed more than 31 million doses, but less than 16 million were administered.
A little pillow
Picking up the pace will involve helping states establish the correct eligibility conditions for vaccination – conditions that are not so restrictive that vaccine doses end up being used in refrigerators, or so loose that there are long lines outside crowded vaccination sites, she said. The Biden team also aims to increase the manufacture of vaccine supplies, increase the number of people who can supply the vaccines and increase the number of locations where vaccines are administered.
Addressing one of the most pressing topics in recent days, Walensky also said that she and Biden’s team are eyeing the coronavirus variants that are emerging in many places around the world, including the United States. The team is working to “dramatically” reinforce surveillance efforts, including partnerships with industrial and academic laboratories, so that they can track any variants that develop or enter the US and start to spread.
The main concerns about the variants are whether they spread more easily, whether they cause more serious illnesses and deaths and become less effective therapies and vaccines, she noted. We saw variants that seem to spread from person to person more easily. But we have yet to see evidence that variants are increasing disease and death or are avoiding vaccines and therapies.
“I think the good news about the variants is that the vaccine’s effectiveness is so good and so high that we have a little pillow,” she said. Even if laboratory studies show that vaccines are not as effective against a variant as the initial strain, “we will probably still end up with a very good vaccine.” His point has been repeated by many other experts who predict that it will take years for the coronavirus to evolve to completely overcome immune responses.
“I just want to remind people: almost any vaccine we have is 95% effective” like the COVID-19 vaccines, she added. “So before we panic and say, ‘Well, should I really get the vaccine if it is not going to work against the variant?’ – It will work against the variant. Is it 95 percent? Perhaps. Is it 70 percent? Perhaps. But our flu shots aren’t 70% effective every year and we still get them. So, I am very optimistic about how these variants will go. “